#36 – An Open Mind On The Open Road: Traveling With Mike Taylor

Mike Taylor [00:00:03]:
Travel.

Ryan Doolittle [00:00:05]:
Can you say Mark Twain? No, Twain.

Mike Taylor [00:00:10]:
Twain.

Ryan Doolittle [00:00:12]:
Good job.

Mike Taylor [00:00:13]:
What’s that?

Ryan Doolittle [00:00:14]:
That is recording. Yeah. Do you think travel is important?

Mike Taylor [00:00:20]:
Wheels. Oh, yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:00:23]:
The tape looks like wheels. And you need wheels to travel lest you fly.

Mike Taylor [00:00:28]:
Oh, what’s that?

Ryan Doolittle [00:00:30]:
That’s a button. Should we push play and start this interview?

Mike Taylor [00:00:34]:
A button?

Ryan Doolittle [00:00:35]:
Yeah, push a button. We’ll start play. Ready?

Mike Taylor [00:00:37]:
Push a button.

Ryan Doolittle [00:00:44]:
Mark Twain may be the father of American literature. He’s got a million great quotes, and even the apocryphal ones are good. A particularly penetrating one leans into the importance of travel. He called it fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness. The general idea is that only by experiencing different cultures can we hope to overcome our human tendency to fear the world’s other tribes. If we stay in our little bubbles, it’s much easier to hate what we don’t know and our beliefs and customs go unchallenged. Today’s guest, Mike Taylor, not only loves that Mark Twain quote, he lives by it. He’s been on so many life changing journeys that I couldn’t even fit them all into this podcast.

Ryan Doolittle [00:01:27]:
Now retired, Mike spent 41 years in the local news business for WLEX TV in Lexington, Kentucky. Travel is his primary core pursuit. If he’s not spending time with his four adult children or nine grandchildren, he’s probably on the road, on a cruise ship, or in the air above some faraway land. He shares his journeys on social media, but today we’re lucky enough to have him share them with us. If you yearn to find retirement happiness beyond your corner of the world, let Mike’s stories be your inspiration. Do you ever wonder who you’ll be and what you’ll do after your career is over? Wouldn’t it be nice to hear stories from people who figured it out who are thriving in retirement? I’m Ryan Doolittle. After working with the Retire Sooner team for years and researching and writing about how they structure their lifestyles, I know there’s more to be learned. So I’m going straight to the source and taking you with me.

Ryan Doolittle [00:02:23]:
My mission with the Happiest Retirees podcast is to inspire 1 million families to find happiness in retirement. I want to learn how to live an exceptional life from people who do it every day. Let’s get started. Mike Taylor, Kentucky news legend. Thanks for joining us on the Happiest Retirees podcast.

Mike Taylor [00:02:44]:
You’re welcome. I’m happy to be here. I love, love your podcast and I love stuff you’re doing on retirement.

Ryan Doolittle [00:02:49]:
Well, thank you I can already tell. I could talk to you for hours. You consider yourself 100% retired. But tell me a little bit, because your. Your primary career was pretty interesting, working in news in Kentucky. So tell me a little bit about that.

Mike Taylor [00:03:01]:
Yeah, I worked for 40 years in. In television news. And probably what’s really unique about my situation is I worked for 40 years at the same television station. That’s almost unheard of.

Ryan Doolittle [00:03:11]:
That is unheard of. Yeah.

Mike Taylor [00:03:12]:
Yeah. So you can only imagine the thousands of people that I work with because they came and worked there three years and left. I mean, they’re all over the country. They’re all over the world. Majored in broadcasting at college, and then I went into broadcasting and stayed in it for 40 years. So I guess I’m one of these rare people that knew what I wanted to do. And as crazy and nuts and insane as the news business can be on a daily basis, I think that’s what I liked about it. I just.

Mike Taylor [00:03:35]:
I’m one of these people that never stops. I just. Constantly moving. They used to make fun of me in college for going too fast down the hallway. They’d be ducking out of the way. So that’s just kind of the way I am. But, no, I started there as a news photographer. I really wanted to get in as a reporter.

Mike Taylor [00:03:49]:
I did a year in radio, and I told him I wanted a job as a reporter, but they had a job as a photographer. And I called the news director at the time, and I said, hey, I’m not a photographer. I’m a reporter, but I know which way to point the camera. And he kind of laughed, and he said, that’s about what I’m paying. Why don’t you come and talk to me? And he wasn’t lying. It was. It was 350 an hour. I still remember it at the time, but it was 1981, so I started there.

Mike Taylor [00:04:11]:
I shot news and sports for a year, but I eventually did get a job as a reporter. I covered city hall and the state government and general news and breaking news for the better part of four years then. And there was opportunity to get into news management. My wife was working at the state highway department, and we’re both from this area, so we kind of wanted to stay. We were starting to have children. We wanted to raise them in one place. So it was good from a family standpoint that I could do that. But so I moved into management.

Mike Taylor [00:04:39]:
I ran the assignment desk for about eight years. They got a little crazy idea that they wanted to change things up. In 1993, asked me to go back to reporting for a year.

Ryan Doolittle [00:04:47]:
Really?

Mike Taylor [00:04:48]:
Yeah, they actually did. They asked me to go back to reporting. They said, yeah, we’re, we’re trying to do something different. We want more mature reporters on the air.

Ryan Doolittle [00:04:53]:
Okay.

Mike Taylor [00:04:54]:
So I did that for a year. And a year later they came back to me. They said, we can’t really find anyone else who can run the assignment desk like you. Would you come back to the desk? So I went back to the desk. I spent the rest of my career there and retired at the end of 2020.

Ryan Doolittle [00:05:05]:
Okay, is this Wlex?

Mike Taylor [00:05:08]:
Wlex TV. It’s the NBC affiliate in Lexington. Went on the air in 1955. I started there in 81. And they’re still going strong. So I had a number of jobs that involved besides running the desk, which would have been answering phones, listening to police scanners, checking emails, checking social media, trying to find stories for people, helping decide what stories we were going to cover was. I was responsible, coordinating our election coverage.

Ryan Doolittle [00:05:32]:
Okay.

Mike Taylor [00:05:33]:
And I was trying to count. I had, I had to count around 70 elections I coordinated. My job was to help compile the data, get it in the system, get it on the air. And then also being from Kentucky and knowing the area and really knowing the history of elections, it was also my job to make the call of who had won the races in the state.

Ryan Doolittle [00:05:51]:
Really? You were the one person decision desk?

Mike Taylor [00:05:54]:
I basically was the one person decision desk. Now, I would always, there were always, usually a couple of other people I would confer with and say, does this make sense? But I pretty much was the one person decision desk.

Ryan Doolittle [00:06:03]:
Really, you were coming with before anyone else had the decision?

Mike Taylor [00:06:06]:
Pretty much. I wasn’t going to go crazy and make a call that didn’t make sense. But, you know, when you get down to one county, it’s a tiny county, it’s got a thousand voters, they all voted Democrat or Republican all their lives. And the race is a thousand apart. You know, the race is over. You know who’s won at that point. Right. But I still go back because they asked me if I would come back and help them do that for elections.

Mike Taylor [00:06:26]:
And I was like, you know, it’s something I kind of enjoy. But when I used to do it, I had to like run the assignment desk, do all those other jobs I mentioned to you, and do that at the same time. So now I go back in, I sit in the back of the room, I get online, I organize everything. There’s chaos going on up front. I get to Ignore it. That’s kind of nice. The phones are ringing. I don’t have to answer them.

Mike Taylor [00:06:47]:
And, you know, it’s. It’s, you know, it takes me about eight days for each election, and they pay me enough to pay for a couple more vacations, which is my obsession anyway.

Ryan Doolittle [00:06:55]:
Obsession, Right. Yeah. In fact. Yeah, I really want to get into that because it seems like travel is maybe your number one core pursuit.

Mike Taylor [00:07:01]:
Absolutely. Well, then I. I’m playing with grandkids.

Ryan Doolittle [00:07:05]:
Okay.

Mike Taylor [00:07:06]:
Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:07:06]:
That’s a good one, too. Yeah.

Mike Taylor [00:07:07]:
Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:07:08]:
And you had a quote that I think Mark Twain said, travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness.

Mike Taylor [00:07:13]:
It would change the world.

Ryan Doolittle [00:07:15]:
Yeah.

Mike Taylor [00:07:15]:
When I was 17. Up until that point in my life, I was raised in southeastern Kentucky, not in a impoverished family, but we didn’t have a lot of extra money and there were four kids and we had only gone on vacation to visit my grandparents in Ohio and my grandparents in West Virginia. That was true. I also lived for when I was really young in Ohio and in Cleveland, Ohio, and Seymour, Indiana, and same thing. Just visiting grandparents. That’s what we did. My dad had three weeks. He said, we’re going to go out west.

Mike Taylor [00:07:43]:
We’re taking a pickup truck. It had three seats, you know, two seats in the front and a bed. And he put a camp cap on the back. No air conditioning. He built in some beds, the seats. And we hopped in the back and me and my sister and two brothers and we went on a trip all the way from Kentucky to Portland, Oregon, all the way down to Pacolla national park to Mount Whitney to Death Valley to Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon to Juarez, Mexico.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:09]:
Holy cow.

Mike Taylor [00:08:10]:
And all the way back through Little Rock, Arkansas, and home. It took. It was a month trip. And just traveling in the back of a pickup truck and pitching tents. Me and my three siblings became obsessed with travel on that trip. All four of us have been to all 50 states.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:27]:
Oh, my gosh. So that trip was what hooked all of you.

Mike Taylor [00:08:30]:
All of us. We. And I. I learned more in that month than I swear I learned in a year of school.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:34]:
Oh, I’m sure.

Mike Taylor [00:08:35]:
I’m sure.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:35]:
Yeah. And how rare is it to have been to all 50 states for anyone but. But all of you and all your siblings have all done it.

Mike Taylor [00:08:43]:
Correct.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:43]:
And that includes Alaska and Hawaii.

Mike Taylor [00:08:45]:
My sister’s husband was in the Marines and they lived in Hawaii for a while, and we didn’t get to visit them then. You know, I had four kids. And television news is not a job where you get wealthy. My wife was a state highway department employee, so with four kids, we couldn’t afford to fly. We drove to almost every. Almost all the 48 states. We didn’t get all the way to California, but most of them. So some of my kids have not quite been to the west coast, but a couple of them have.

Mike Taylor [00:09:08]:
And so we didn’t get to go to Hawaii when she lived there, but I flew there when my kids were gone out of college and we could afford to go there. And then North Dakota was my 49th, and I just drove up there and went camping one night. Just heck of it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:09:21]:
Wait, you just drove straight to North Dakota from Kentucky and then camped?

Mike Taylor [00:09:25]:
Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:09:25]:
Because you hadn’t been there, so you’re like, that’s my destination.

Mike Taylor [00:09:28]:
Yeah. I do travel in all kinds of different ways. Some are expensive, Some are really inexpensive. Alaska. We did an Alaskan cruise after my mother passed away. My wife and I were talking about going, and my daughter and her husband and her two kids were going to go. And I asked my dad if he would like to join us after my mother had passed away the year before, and he said, yeah, I think that’d be nice. So we.

Mike Taylor [00:09:48]:
We flew to Vancouver and we took the Alaskan cruise up along the coast there. And my sister and her husband and both my brothers and their spouses were like, dad’s going. We’re going too. So it was 13 of us. Alaska was number. That was number 50.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:04]:
Wow. What a way to ring in the 50th.

Mike Taylor [00:10:06]:
Yeah, yeah. So it was really cool. So, you know, some goals. One was to get to all 50 states. I’ve done that. I’m working on getting to all 63 national parks.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:15]:
You’ve been to 41 of them, right?

Mike Taylor [00:10:17]:
41, yeah. Some guys are difficult now.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:20]:
Oh, yeah.

Mike Taylor [00:10:20]:
I mean, American Samoa, Gates of the.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:22]:
Arctic, those are a little harder to. You can’t really get in the pickup.

Mike Taylor [00:10:25]:
And head to America. No, but I’ll get there. I’ll get there. It’ll take time, but I’ll get there.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:31]:
And you’re trying to get to as many Major League baseball stadiums as possible. How many have you been to?

Mike Taylor [00:10:35]:
I’ve been to 20 now, to be fair, some of those don’t exist anymore. Like, I went and saw the Montreal Expos play.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:41]:
Oh, yeah.

Mike Taylor [00:10:42]:
And. And in indoor baseball and French. That was fascinating.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:46]:
Indoor what?

Mike Taylor [00:10:47]:
What?

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:47]:
Indoor baseball.

Mike Taylor [00:10:48]:
Indoor baseball. It was in Montreal, so it was indoor baseball in French. Montreal is a French city. Subtitled in English.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:54]:
I always liked the Expo’s uniforms. They had that orange and blue, it was like a. Yeah, that was a good one.

Mike Taylor [00:11:00]:
Yeah, it was really cool. So. But yeah, baseball’s one of those things I enjoy. I’ve actually helped coach youth sports for years, since I was 19, still helping coach my 9 year old grandson’s little league team. My son’s coaching it and he’s allowing me to be the assistant coach. So. But I coached both my sons growing up. I helped out with my daughters diving and gymnastics meets.

Mike Taylor [00:11:20]:
My other daughters played soccer and I helped coach soccer. So I don’t do as much of that anymore because I travel. My son asked me to help. I said, I’ll help. I said, but don’t count on me because tomorrow I might get on the plane and fly anywhere in the world. So, yeah, so that’s, that’s kind of part of my, my motto in retirement is keep busy. I don’t really have any trouble keeping busy. You know, I ran into someone who’d been retired for about a year, several months after I retired, and I said, how’s it going? I said, oh, retirement is awesome.

Mike Taylor [00:11:47]:
I love it. He said, give it a year, you’ll be bored. I said, you don’t. Me?

Ryan Doolittle [00:11:50]:
Yeah, I go to you for about five minutes and I, I would already have known that.

Mike Taylor [00:11:53]:
Yeah, you don’t, you don’t know me. I will not be bored. Yeah. I mean, every now and then I’ll have a down day. Like I had a couple this week where I was and it was kind of gloomy outside and I just kind of stayed in and watched some tv. But, but when I do that, I’m like, I just feel like I just wasted a day. Yeah, I got things, I got places I want to go. So I’m getting a plane tomorrow.

Ryan Doolittle [00:12:11]:
Tomorrow?

Mike Taylor [00:12:12]:
Tomorrow, yeah. Flying to Tampa.

Ryan Doolittle [00:12:14]:
Where are you going?

Mike Taylor [00:12:15]:
Well, another one of the many things I enjoy is me and my two brothers and my son and my wife, we all tailgate at University of Kentucky football games. Okay. It’s, it’s a big family event. You know. Kentucky football over the years, historically has not been, been great, although they’ve been above average in the last 10 years. And we’ve enjoyed it, but we’ve gone anyway. We, we have so much fun tailgating. My, my youngest brother gets there at 7:30 in the morning, even if it’s the 7:30 night game.

Mike Taylor [00:12:42]:
Now I can’t do that. I get there a few hours before the game, we watch some other games, we go into the games, we, we have a good time as a family. So when I Saw that Texas was joining the southeastern conference this year, I’m like, oh, we should go to Austin and go to the game. So I. I bought tickets before I realized that we weren’t going to be as good as I had hoped. This year we’re going because I booked it as an entire adventure. We’re flying to Austin. We’re going to rent a car.

Mike Taylor [00:13:05]:
We’re driving to Big Bend national park, which I was at two years ago. It’s a very, very remote national park, not one of the most highly visited national parks. It’s on the Rio Grande in the bend of Texas. It’s 800,000 acres of wilderness, mostly desert, although there’s some mountains and a lodge and stuff like that. But we’re going to stay in a geodome just outside the park. Geodome? Yeah. But then we’re going to spend one day hiking in the park. There’s a beautiful area called St.

Mike Taylor [00:13:36]:
Helena Canyon, which. The Rio Grande goes between one massive cliff on one side, one on the other side. One’s United States, one’s Mexico at the other end of the park. When I camped there two years ago by myself, I camped the other end of the park at the Rio Grande campground. And a friend had told me that when she was living in Austin, they went there and that I need to make sure I went to the Boquillas border crossing. Okay, it’s on the Rio Grande. It’s run by the national park Service. It’s a.

Mike Taylor [00:14:04]:
It’s a border crossing into Mexico in Big Bend National Park.

Ryan Doolittle [00:14:08]:
And. And it’s run by the national park Service.

Mike Taylor [00:14:11]:
Correct. So because it’s. It’s. There’s nothing there. This totally remote. So. But what it is, it’s a crossing into the little town of Boquillas, which is about 2 to 300 people living right on the Rio Grande. It’s in a federally protected area of Mexico.

Mike Taylor [00:14:27]:
That’s about a million acres. I get. I don’t know if that would be considered a national park there, but along those lines, picture that. And the closest town or gas station to Boquillas in Mexico is 160 miles away on a dirt road. So what you do is you. It’s. It’s really cool. You gotta go to the border crossing station as a park ranger there, and he.

Mike Taylor [00:14:46]:
He makes sure you have a passport or a passport card. You walk down to the Rio Grande, and when they see you down there, they send a rowboat across to pick you up.

Ryan Doolittle [00:14:53]:
I rowboat.

Mike Taylor [00:14:55]:
A rowboat, yeah, It’s. It’s a $5 round trip. But anyway, when you get across on the rowboat, it’s about a half mile walk to the town, which is what I did the last time. But there’s also a whole stable of burrows there and you can pay for a ride on a burrow in the town. You can even get one of the guys to be a guide for you if you can’t walk or ride a borough. I noticed there were some pickup trucks parked there and they said you can get a pickup truck ride for a certain amount into town. In town there are two restaurants, there’s a small church, a very small store, a pool hall and just some scattered houses. And so all the people at the houses are selling crafts that they made.

Mike Taylor [00:15:31]:
That’s really the only way they are making money other than the restaurants or maybe being as guides.

Ryan Doolittle [00:15:36]:
And did you say, do you know where I can get some good Mexican food around here? Is that.

Mike Taylor [00:15:39]:
Yeah, yeah. This actually turned into just ridiculously crazy story. So I’m by myself. I’ve been traveling across the southern United States going to. To state capitals, which I usually go to state capitals. I tell people when you’re traveling, if you like museums, go to state capitals. They’re free. Museums.

Ryan Doolittle [00:15:56]:
Oh yeah. I never thought of it like that.

Mike Taylor [00:15:58]:
There’s all kinds of stuff in there to see and they’re free. Just walk through and you can walk into the chambers. It’s really fascinating. So I’ve been doing that and I got to Austin and I did some stuff at the LBJ library. And on the way to Big Ben, I stopped at the LBJ ranch, which was really fascinating, part of my history obsession. And then I went on to Big Ben. My goal was to add two new national parks to my, my list. Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains up to the north.

Mike Taylor [00:16:20]:
I got there and I camped and I realized that, oh, I was going to be there hiking for one day. But Boquillas border crossing is only open five days a week.

Ryan Doolittle [00:16:29]:
Okay.

Mike Taylor [00:16:30]:
So just, just enough, you know. So the first day I hiked and went to the canyon. I went up down the river. It’s just really pretty park. The second day I’m like, I’m heading to Guadalupe Mountains. I gotta leave, but I can’t miss this. And so at 9 o’clock I got to the ranger station, the border crossing, and I went across and I had breakfast and I left and I shot a video of me doing this. I was there literally an hour.

Mike Taylor [00:16:54]:
I shot it on TikTok and I put it up and I went on and I didn’t really have much service. So I got to Guadalupe Mountains and I opened my phone and I had a million views. And by. By the end of, like, two weeks, I had 1.8 million views on it, over 5,000 comments. You know, with these things, I mean, I understand all this. I work in television for so long, I understand all the algorithm stuff that goes into this. So I went to a border crossing. What’s in the news right now, Immigration, border crossings.

Mike Taylor [00:17:24]:
This was 20. This was two years of 20, 22. So it blew up from the standpoint of I had border crossing Mexico. So I had 5,000 comments. The vast majority of the comments, the vast majority were, that is so cool. I live in Texas. Didn’t even know that was there. I’m going tomorrow.

Ryan Doolittle [00:17:40]:
You sort of change the perspective for people. You made them. You know, it’s a. It’s a cool thing. What’s the next country that’s on the horizon?

Mike Taylor [00:17:48]:
Something in the area of Romania.

Ryan Doolittle [00:17:50]:
Oh, okay.

Mike Taylor [00:17:51]:
So I like, do different kinds of travel. I. I like. I told you, I sometimes drive in camp. Sometimes I fly places and rent a car. Last two months ago, I flew to Denver, rent a car, and went to five national parks with my dad, and we camped, and sometimes I fly and we stay in hotels. So since I retired, I’ve done five different kinds of trips that I can identify. One of one, besides the ones I’ve just mentioned.

Mike Taylor [00:18:15]:
The year after I retired, I got in my pickup truck with a tent and I drove 6,500 miles in a month all the way to Seattle. And I went to eight national parks and three presidential hometowns and a bunch of state and national shrines and things like that. So for my 65th birthday, I had this thing that I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to take a backpack, buy a train ticket, buy a plane ticket, go to Europe and just hop around. Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:18:40]:
So just go.

Mike Taylor [00:18:41]:
Just go. Yeah. You can buy what’s called a global pass for 38. Three countries to jump on and off of trains in Europe.

Ryan Doolittle [00:18:48]:
Really? I was willing, like, everything in the European union or.

Mike Taylor [00:18:51]:
Yes, 33 countries. Yes.

Ryan Doolittle [00:18:53]:
Okay.

Mike Taylor [00:18:53]:
Basically, you just go get on. So that was my goal. And I was saying, I’m willing to stay in hostels. And my wife was like, I’d love to go some of those countries, but I don’t really want to stay in hostels. So I ended up having to book some really kind of unique places to stay, and I had to plan a little more that we. We did eight countries, starting in Greece, went to Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Austria, and ended up in Venice. And then before the pandemic hit, I had been involved with a couple different organizations. One called the Fuller center for Housing and the other Habitat Global.

Ryan Doolittle [00:19:27]:
Is Habitat. Is that the same as Habitat for Humanity?

Mike Taylor [00:19:30]:
Yes. Yeah, it’s just, they, it’s just their global branch where they build in other countries.

Ryan Doolittle [00:19:34]:
Oh, okay.

Mike Taylor [00:19:35]:
And the Fuller center does the same thing. They, they also build in other countries. They really do the same types of things. So I’d been with the Fuller center and with a group from this area, and we’ve been to Haiti four times.

Ryan Doolittle [00:19:46]:
Wow, really? To go, to go help?

Mike Taylor [00:19:48]:
Yes, we went four times for eight days each summer, along with a number of other teams through the years. For about, in about four years, we completed 90 homes in an entire village.

Ryan Doolittle [00:19:58]:
Holy cow. That’s amazing. Do you know who Mitch Alblum is? He wrote Tuesdays with Maury. We interviewed him on our flagship podcast, Retire Sooner. And a big part of his life now is going to Haiti. He runs an orphanage.

Mike Taylor [00:20:12]:
Yeah, we actually. So the first few years we. I said we worked with the Fuller center the first two years we did do that. The last few years we’ve met enough people that we went on our own and we actually tried to help rebuild an orphanage. And so, yeah, so every time I do a trip like this, I try to do a side trip to someplace I want something I want to see. So. And, and that makes it much more economical. You’re playing for a plane ticket.

Mike Taylor [00:20:34]:
You’re there. Anyway, so we went to Holland Bay, a World Heritage site, which this. There’s thousands of these islands sticking out of this Bay Area. It’s just, it’s almost like you’re in the land before time. I don’t know how to explain it, but. So what I was getting to was my next retirement trip. Then I was like, we’re going to do something vastly different. Let’s sign up with the Fuller center and go someplace really unique.

Mike Taylor [00:20:55]:
So we went in this summer and built homes in Madagascar. And, and I was like, well, again, we’re flying a long way. It’s not a cheap plane ticket. So we flew to Kenya first and did a half day safari.

Ryan Doolittle [00:21:07]:
Oh, incredible.

Mike Taylor [00:21:08]:
And then so we went to Madagascar and, and worked on three homes there. Incredibly poor country. Most people there think 80% of the people there live on less than a dollar fifty a day. And 80% of the people there are farmers. So we built right in the center of the island three homes out of bricks that were made from the mud and clay around the area and use mud as our mortar. And. But they turned out really nice. We got the family and all these trips.

Mike Taylor [00:21:33]:
The family has to work with you. So we got to know the family that we worked with. They had two kids. The kids worked with us. So that was my roast reset. So what I was saying is next year, our team leader is going to do a home build and rol Romania. And I think the plan, what I’m thinking anyway is we’ll probably go to Istanbul and Budapest and some countries around the area and then do a home build in Romania. It’s actually near Transylvania.

Ryan Doolittle [00:21:54]:
Oh, that’s fun. Okay. Wear your vampire teeth. So travel is obviously, like, so important, but I want to get into a little bit. You have nine grandkids. Did you say four kids?

Mike Taylor [00:22:05]:
I had four kids. Two boys, two girls.

Ryan Doolittle [00:22:07]:
Okay. Because we’ve done some. Some surveys of happy retirees, and we found that a lot of them live near at least half of their adult children. So how many of your kids live near you?

Mike Taylor [00:22:18]:
My oldest son lives in Lexington, about 20 miles away. I see him almost all the time. His wife works at the hospital in town there. He works. Does a tech from home now since the pandemic, but he has two kids, and one of them is one. I coach in the league or a help coach in the league. Yeah. Like I said, when I can be there.

Mike Taylor [00:22:39]:
And then a daughter who’s quite a handful.

Ryan Doolittle [00:22:42]:
Aren’t they all?

Mike Taylor [00:22:43]:
She’s seven. She’s. She’s. She’s a hoot. This morning she was crying because she is trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life.

Ryan Doolittle [00:22:50]:
Getting an early start on that existential.

Mike Taylor [00:22:52]:
Dread, trying to find. She’s. She’s very upset, though. She thought she wanted to design houses, but she found out this morning at church. She asked if she had to go to college for that, and the answer was, yeah, you probably do need to go to college to be an architect. So she started crying. Oh, no. Real, real, real tears.

Mike Taylor [00:23:09]:
Yeah. Because she has two requirements for whatever her future career is going to be. No college and no blood. Then we have. Our oldest daughter is a pediatrician, and she has three kids. And she actually lives here in town with us about a mile away. She has two girls and a little boy. And right now she has a foreign exchange student from France living with her.

Mike Taylor [00:23:27]:
So she’s my overachiever, the national championship diver for naia and just was determined to be a pediatrician from the time she was eight. And she is. Her husband’s an actuary and they’re doing well, but go kids. Those kids are fun. One’s a gymnast like she was. The other’s learning horseback riding and the other one is. Just started playing T ball. So there’s another opportunity there.

Ryan Doolittle [00:23:47]:
Yes.

Mike Taylor [00:23:47]:
So I went and watched him play the other day and he thinks you’re supposed to throw the bat at the tee.

Ryan Doolittle [00:23:55]:
You mean you’re not.

Mike Taylor [00:23:56]:
It seemed to knock the ball. Okay. But the bat also went with it. But anyway, so. So there’s. That’s five of them. Those are the five that are in our area. My youngest son is a pastor at a church in Crestview, Florida.

Mike Taylor [00:24:09]:
He adopted. They adopted two children because they were having trouble having children. And after they adopted two children, they got pregnant. They’ve had two.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:17]:
Okay.

Mike Taylor [00:24:18]:
That.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:18]:
So they doubled their. Okay. And they’re in Florida, so I guess it’s not close. But you get to see them sometimes.

Mike Taylor [00:24:24]:
Yeah, we saw them last weekend, so we try to. Oh, okay. Yeah, we try to get down whenever they have time.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:30]:
As much as you travel, everything’s closed.

Mike Taylor [00:24:32]:
Yeah, it’s. I get there. But so, yes, that they. Two. Two very little ones and a 12 year old and a 7 year old. So. So they’re there. And then my youngest daughter lives in Bowling, Kentucky, about two hours away.

Mike Taylor [00:24:44]:
She does not have a child yet, so she’s married, but no children yet. So there could be more.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:48]:
It could be more. And you. So you get to see all four of them. I mean, some more than others, but you see all four of them kind of regularly. It sounds like.

Mike Taylor [00:24:57]:
Yeah. Wow. Okay.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:58]:
Yeah, that. That has been a big bellwether for us and the happy retirees we’ve met, like, they live at least near half of them.

Mike Taylor [00:25:05]:
So, I mean, look, I love having kids and it’s the best thing I ever did in my life. Seriously. Or my kids were the best thing I’ve ever done. The nice thing about grandkids is you can play with them, you can do things you would never let your kids do, and you get tired, you send them back home.

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:22]:
Yeah, you get all the perks, but you don’t have to do all the grunt work.

Mike Taylor [00:25:25]:
Now, that’s not true. I mean, I know there are people that are helping raise their grandkids, so it’s probably not true for everyone, but for us, we’re. We’re very fortunate.

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:31]:
Right, of course. Let me ask you. So you’re in Versailles, Kentucky. We interviewed a guy named Michael Blow, and he runs the Old Friends Equine where they. They provide a dignified Retirement for thoroughbreds. Do you know the place?

Mike Taylor [00:25:44]:
Oh, yeah, I do know the place quite well. I pass it regularly. I’ve been thinking I need to take my grandkids there. I got some friends whose house backs up to it. It’s a really great facility. We did a lot of news stories on it over the years. They find horses that have outlived their usefulness to the owner and bring them back there and give them a nice retirement home.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:01]:
Well, if you get a chance to go to the old friends equine, let me know, because Michael is. He was one of the funniest people I’ve interviewed. He.

Mike Taylor [00:26:09]:
His.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:09]:
His whole mantra was like, I love being old.

Mike Taylor [00:26:12]:
I always say on his birthday, when you get a year older, it beats the alternative.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:17]:
That’s a good one too.

Mike Taylor [00:26:18]:
Yeah. So. Yeah, so. But what I was going to tell you, that was Versailles, Kentucky is kind of where we decided to settle when we were both working in Lexington because it was close. We get to work in 20 minutes from. It’s a small town that we could raise our kids in, but. But still be close to work. But I will tell you, I’ve been to.

Mike Taylor [00:26:33]:
I’ve been to the castle in Versailles in France. And I will tell you, we do have a castle here. Oh, you do? We do. It’s one of the most photographed things in Kentucky. It sits right on the main road between Lexington and Versailles, US 60. And people just stop and go, why is there a castle here? They gotta start taking pictures.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:52]:
What’s the name of it in case anyone wanted to visit?

Mike Taylor [00:26:54]:
It’s called the Kentucky Castle.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:57]:
Kentucky Castle. Oh, that makes sense. Okay, what advice do you have for maybe someone who is retired but not enjoying it, or someone who is thinking about retiring but they’re kind of scared and they don’t know what to do?

Mike Taylor [00:27:08]:
Everybody’s different, right? And I think the people that are happiest in retirement, in my view, are the people that had a life before they retire. So if you’re so wrapped up in your work that your work is your or your career, that that’s your. That’s your person, that’s who you are, it’s fine. I love my career. It’s not who I was. I loved it. I did. I did so many.

Mike Taylor [00:27:29]:
I got so many things I would have never gotten to do any other way. I covered five presidents and floods and tornadoes and presidential inaugurations and 18 Kentucky derbies and things. It was in places I had a front row seat to history. I loved it, but that’s not who I Was, I was a father, a youth coach. I was always involved in like something, some type of thing outside of work. So if you, I think the people that can do that in their life will find when they get to retirement that, oh, I can do more of that. And I really like it. If it’s things you enjoy and some people are so wrapped up that that is their, and that’s okay.

Mike Taylor [00:28:04]:
If that’s who you want to be, if that’s who you enjoy being, then maybe you don’t retire. I don’t know. I, I, I just can’t imagine that I had to retire early. And I will tell you this because I think this is important. Don’t wait too long if you want to retire. Don’t, don’t be like, you know, you hear this all the time. People going, gosh, I don’t know if we’re ready to have kids, if we can afford it yet. Well, you can’t ever afford kids.

Ryan Doolittle [00:28:27]:
Wait, were you listening in on this conversation I just had with my wife?

Mike Taylor [00:28:30]:
You can’t ever afford kids. It’s impossible. But you’ll figure it out. So it’s the same with retirement. I tell people all the time, I retired at 62 while I was healthy and I could do the travel I wanted while I could play with the grandkids. And I’m going to go as strong as I can and enjoy every minute of it. And if I run out of money when I’m like 85 years old, someone just please bring me a sandwich.

Ryan Doolittle [00:28:50]:
You don’t, you don’t end your life thinking, I wish I had answered more phones at the station. You know what, do you really get to keep memories?

Mike Taylor [00:28:58]:
Right? Those are my souvenirs.

Ryan Doolittle [00:28:59]:
Well, that is really, really profound advice. And just from my perspective, I mean the good one of the parts I feel a little guilty about is I get all this free advice from people from doing this show. So thank you for that, that was really nice.

Mike Taylor [00:29:14]:
And look, not everybody can afford elaborate travel, right? You can find cheap ways to do it, go somewhere.

Ryan Doolittle [00:29:20]:
Well, Mike, just to round it back to Mark Twain, he said broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime. And I want to say you truly are not in one little corner of the earth. You’re always in every part of the earth at all times. So you seem like a very well rounded person.

Mike Taylor [00:29:43]:
22 national parks, 159 countries to go.

Ryan Doolittle [00:29:47]:
You’re going to have to come back on the show and update us on the numbers.

Mike Taylor [00:29:50]:
I’d be happy to.

Ryan Doolittle [00:29:51]:
All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us on the Happiest Retirees podcast.

Mike Taylor [00:29:55]:
All right, thanks, Glenn. Thanks for having me.